On Friday, March 15, my ten o’clock morning consultation was with Sir Percy Hampton Churchill Saxe-Coburg Hanover Blithering-Snipe Smythe-Smith-Smythe Kensington VI, PhD OS FHS KCVO LLE OBE HFRS BYOB, Economic Attaché to the Royal Embassy of Her Majesty, Elizabeth II of the Court of Saint James’s, by the Grace of God, Queen of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland to the United States of America. We were supposed to discuss analyses of natural gas price elasticities under data-driven tariff scenarios based on heuristic Monte-Carlo models under various climate-change assumption vectors for the period 2021 through 2026, but midway into the first set of partial differential equations, be broke down bawling like a baby. “Jesus Christ, Percy,” I […]

There a widespread, often repeated observation among grandparents that personalities and talents seem to skip generations. Perhaps this is just the wishful thinking of elderly people disappointed in how their children turned out, but in the case of my brother-in-law, Hank Palikowski and his son, Hank Jr., it definitely seems to possess some credence. Having had an opportunity to meet Hank’s father on several occasions, I’d say his grandson is much more like him than Hank is. Both grandfather Palikowski and Hank Jr. are pragmatic, successful and highly intelligent individuals, while frankly, my brother-in-law has proven to be a damned fool and a pretty gullible one at that. As regular readers of this Web log will readily recall, Hank Jr. […]

Since eight hundred thousand federal employees and God knows how many federal contractors have either been subject to involuntary servitude or had nothing to do for the last month, it stands to reason that many of this Web log’s readers may wonder if the historic Border Wall Shutdown affected my business. After all, it certainly affected plenty of others – practically every enterprise in the Washington DC metropolitan area, from pizza parlors, car washes, nail salons, dry cleaners, supermarkets and department stores to call girls, wine bars, dog walkers, spas, five star restaurants and recreational drug dealers felt the bite of a decline in demand for their goods and services. But the fact is, during that epic game of Chicken […]

Okay, first of all, I want to say that IMHO, the word “unprecedented” should be retired from the English language because it has been used so much since June 16, 2015 that it has been worn out. That date, of course, is the day when Donald John Trump rode down a golden escalator and told the world he was running for President of the United States of America. That’s when the word “unprecedented” went from a fairly ordinary, quotidian, average, run-of-the-mill English adjective to an utterance so common as to rank right up there with “ohmigod,” “thank you, next,” “oh no, you did-nt,” “gimme a high five,” “cray-cray,” “squad goal,” “adulting,” “turnt,” “on fleek,” “keep it one hundred,” “suh,” “that […]

Well, it’s been two years since the last US national election, and, as the Constitution prescribes, the entire House of Representatives and one third of the Senate stood for re-election or replacement by the American voters. And since the Constitution also says the President gets elected every four years, we’re still stuck with Donald J. Trump, and I might add, also still stuck with an increasingly divided and querulous American public. It’s pretty clear now, that despite the passage of one hundred and fifty-three years and a complete reversal of the respective positions of the Republican and Democratic parties on racial and civil rights issues, the Civil War never actually ended. No, instead, like a case of herpes, it has […]